


Unwanted Things

by jupiter_mechanism



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Comfort, Fluff, Laughable Umbrella, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:20:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28201503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jupiter_mechanism/pseuds/jupiter_mechanism
Summary: Look at it. What does it think it's doing here?
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 4
Kudos: 22





	Unwanted Things

They rarely walked that way since the Lonely. Jon leading and Martin a step behind, out of sight in the traditional sense. The sky was still watching, of course, a constant, roiling storm of scrutiny, but Jon tried not to.  
He tried to trust the sounds of Martin behind him, the creak of backpack straps, steps just out of step with his own. The sharp breath that preceded any question asked after a period of silence.  
“I don’t suppose it would do any good to ask how much farther it is?”  
Jon smiled. He was still making peace with how easily he did so nowadays, with the sky always watching and screams always in the distance.  
He was making peace. More than he would ever have thought possible a few months before, in a world not made of fear.  
“No,” he confirmed, “It wouldn’t.”  
“Well,” Martin huffed. A step behind, a hand on one strap of his backpack, modifying the creak-and-sway rhythm of him keeping pace. “I won’t ask, then.”  
“You’re learning,” Jon congratulated him. Glancing over his shoulder, giving in to the desire, constant and not always harmful, to see. “One of these days, you-”  
The smile tipped and froze on his lips. His steps slowed, turned sideways, faltered. The sky blinked; he felt it everywhere, a second of stark supernatural blindness.  
“Martin,” he said, handling the name as he would an old, potentially unstable explosive, “What is that?”  
Martin glanced down at what swung from his free hand. Its skeletal shape, skeletal shadow branded on the land by panoptic light. Twisted and pitiful, but still recognizable as a parody of the function it had once had.  
“This?” He tilted it, its tip towards the sky, and the sky flinched, the reflex of any sensitive membrane menaced by rusted metal. “It’s an umbrella.”  
“I know it’s an-” He cleared his throat. The bile of a recent statement was trying to climb it, words he was unwilling to regurgitate outside of their domain. “But why is it here?”  
Martin shrugged. The umbrella followed his movement, a pitiful attempt to mimic, to please.  
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “It just seemed like it could be useful. Not all the domains are as dry as that one.”  
“No, I- I suppose not, but-” He raised a hand, reaching for, failing to find the words that had flowed so easily from Leah’s mind. The contempt and desperate loneliness that had made the umbrella seem like a prank played on life itself. “It’s in shreds, it’s not going to do much to protect you.”  
“No?” Martin reached for it with his other, his uncorrupted, hand. “It seems-”  
“Martin, don’t, it’s-”  
“-pretty intact, actually.”  
Shwump.  
Jon’s senses, as many as were still passably human, wanted to tell him that was the sound it made. But the part of him that had dreamed dead, that was tied by optic nerves to the sky, knew better.  
It was the sound of a bucket scratching gravel at the bottom of a dry well. The sound of a parachute, a last hope, opening torn.  
Not just the sound of something broken, beyond use, but the sound of being broken. Of being relied upon and giving way, a last, croaking laugh of metal.  
Martin frowned appraisingly at the spider’s clutch of its frame, the gaps rotted slack through its fabric. The sky’s faint green ghostlight fell through it like a curse and glared back from the barren ground.  
“Okay,” he admitted, “Maybe you’re right. I guess I just...Jon? Are you all right?”  
“Hm?” Jon blinked, decoupling from the sky and the statement still echoing in his mind. One of his hands was pressed to his chest, searching for a pulse that seemed to have fallen to his feet. His face was cold; the smile he balanced across it was still frozen, and hung crooked.  
“I’m fine,” he lied. “Why don’t you just throw it away, and we can-”  
“You look like you’re going to throw up.” A new question drew its line between Martin’s brows. “Wait, can we even- you know what, I don’t want to know. Anyways, yeah. I guess I just thought- it looked sort of sad lying there, you know?”  
Jon frowned at the umbrella. It slumped back at him, even more pitiful in human hands than it had been lying on the ground. ‘Sad’ wasn’t one of the words that had flowed like bloodletting from his mind when he’d first seen it.  
But those words had been secondhand, not his, and Martin was smiling at the umbrella.  
Not like the lying rictus that still hung on Jon’s face. Or the smile he made up out of whole cloth, sometimes, when asked if he was all right. Martin was smiling the way he rarely did when he knew Jon was watching, small, distant, as if still half-wrapped in fog. Half-forgotten, wanted by no one he could remember.  
Useful to, loved by, no one who could reach him.  
“Well, I...I suppose,” Jon sighed. “You can keep it if you like. I don’t know what good it will do, but-”  
“I guess if you hit someone with it-”  
“No!” Jon swallowed the horror from his voice a word too late. Cleared his throat, and pretended not to see the question-mark arch of Martin’s brows. “No. Keep it if you like, but you’re not going to start picking fights with Avatars with it.”  
The arches fell. Martin swung the umbrella around, a flaunt that filled its rotten fabric with sighs.  
“I didn’t say I was going to. Well,” he admitted, “Maybe one. If we could just go back and find Simon Fairchild-”  
“No.”  
“Well, you’re no fun.” He swung the umbrella shut, a last dead silken sigh and a flourish that wouldn’t have worked if it hadn’t been so eager to please. His smile emerged slowly, fully from the fog. “Maybe just Elias, then.”  
Jon’s melted in turn, became natural again and warm on his lips. He reached for Martin’s hand, the one that had touched the umbrella only in passing.  
“All right. Maybe Elias,” he agreed, and pulled Martin gently into step with him. At his side, where no power of the sky was necessary to know, from second to second, that they were together. The umbrella swung from Martin’s other hand like a mangy, following dog, a wild thing looking for scraps or carrion. A haunt of a world that had ended in a way everyone had feared and no one had predicted.  
A laughable thing. A wretched, pitiful, repulsive thing. But he was smiling in a way he meant, and Martin’s hand had turned to envelop his. Their hands were swinging together, an ongoing conversation of warmth and tug and momentum that kept him anchored on the changed earth and Martin in the clear air, safely separate from the powers that would try to claim them.  
So, perhaps, for that...  
Just for that...  
The umbrella still had some use, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> I remember seeing a post on Tumblr once about how people who were made to feel weird or unwanted as kids often grow up with an affection for the strange and cast-off. I haven’t been able to find the post since, but that was what made me think of Martin and the umbrella, and the desire he might have to give it a purpose again.


End file.
